Home > Blossary: African Language Groups
Most languages spoken in Africa belong to one of three large language families: Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan, and Niger–Congo. Another hundred belong to small families such as Ubangian and the various families called Khoisan, or the Indo-European and Austronesian language families which originated outside Africa; the presence of the latter two dates to 2,600 and 1,000 years ago, respectively. In addition, African languages include several unclassified languages and sign languages.

Category: Languages

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Created by: tula.ndex

Number of Blossarys: 51

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Many African countries have national sign languages, such as Algerian Sign Language, Tunisian Sign Language, Ethiopian Sign Language, while other sign languages are restricted to small areas or ...

Domain: Language; Category: Language learning

Due partly to its multilingualism and its colonial past, a substantial proportion of the world's creole languages are to be found in Africa. Some are based on Indo-European languages (e.g. Krio from ...

Domain: Language; Category: Language learning

Afrikaans is Indo-European, as are the lexifiers of most African creoles. Afrikaans is the only Indo-European language known to have developed in Africa, thus it is an African language. Since the ...

Domain: Language; Category: Language learning

Several languages spoken in Africa belong to language families concentrated or originating outside of the African continent: for example, Malagasy, the language of Madagascar, is an Austronesian ...

Domain: Language; Category: Language learning

The Niger–Congo language family is the largest group of Africa (and probably of the world) in terms of the number of languages. One of its salient features is an elaborate noun class system with ...

Domain: Language; Category: Language learning

Nilo-Saharan is extremely diverse and thus a somewhat controversial grouping uniting over a hundred languages from southern Egypt to northern Tanzania and into Nigeria and DR Congo, with the Songhay ...

Domain: Language; Category: Language learning

Afroasiatic languages are spoken throughout the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahel. There are approximately 375 Afroasiatic languages spoken by over 350 million ...

Domain: Language; Category: Language learning

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